Toughest job in SF? Tenderloin garbagemen work late at...

2of3Recology's Ron Reali takes the elevator to to the Padre Apartments' basement while collecting garbage on Jones Street in Tenderloin District in San Francisco, Calif., on Tuesday, December 3, 2019.Photo: Scott Strazzante / The Chronicle

3of3Recology Operations Supervisor Kareem Saber and Ron Reali (left) guide a truck as it backs into Antonio Alley in the Tenderloin District in San Francisco, Calif., on Tuesday, December 3, 2019.Photo: Scott Strazzante / The Chronicle

Ron Reali and Bobby Carini move with incredible speed and precision, two necessary skills when you’re cleaning the dirtiest, most foul-smelling neighborhood in a very dirty, foul-smelling city.

The two men collect trash from homes and businesses in the Tenderloin, driving their huge Recology truck along busy streets and squeezing it into the tiniest alleys. They remember each address on the route, the number of cans at each location, the size of the cans, which key fits which gate and where they’ll have to cope with basement flooding, rodents, staircases and other obstacles.

The job is like a cardio and weight workout while playing chess. And it takes a special kind of patience to block out the drunk or high people screaming at you while you’re doing it. Thankfully for guys like Reali and Carini — and Tenderloin residents — the waste collection company is making some changes that should make the grimy neighborhood a little cleaner.

“It’s the job, and I love the job, so I do it,” shrugged Reali, 53, who’s worked at Recology for 18½ years.

“Don’t forget the half!” he said like a little kid announcing his age.

I tagged along with Reali and Carini the other night and even got to ride shotgun in their massive truck. It provided a close-up view of Recology’s effort to address the ever-present litter and worse on San Francisco’s grungy streets. But it also made it clear the mission is a truly monumental, never-finished task.

Even as the dedicated pair removed waste from the cans in the Tenderloin, piles of stomach-churning filth remained on the sidewalks. Old clothes, empty liquor bottles, banana peels, chicken bones, beer cans, cardboard boxes, pillow cases, plastic bags, mattresses and soggy french fries dotted many blocks. Plus, in a Tenderloin twist to the Cinderella tale, there was a single plastic, black stiletto left behind on Jones Street.

Coming to the rescue, hopefully, are new and improved trash cans. Perhaps counterintuitively, the city’s garbage cans — those affixed to the sidewalks as well as the blue, green and black plastic bins in people’s homes and businesses — have long contributed to San Francisco’s notorious trashiness.

The city’s hills make the plastic cans more prone to tip over. The wind can knock them over or send trash wafting out of the top. And the cans are easy to rummage through by people plucking out valuable recyclables, looking for other treasure or just in the mood to make a mess. They’re also easy to vandalize or even drag away.

Recology has long allowed customers to pay an extra monthly fee to keep their bins padlocked when put on the streets, and garbage collectors have carried huge rings of keys to unlock each one.

But the company began testing a new version of the blue bins for recyclables in August that has a smart lock built into it. The customer has a key for use during the week, and the Recology trucks have a mechanism to release the lock once the bins are attached to the vehicles. That means garbage collectors don’t need keys. The bins are also weighted, which makes them much harder to move or tip over, and their hinges are reinforced with steel, making them far harder to break open.

The August test in Hayes Valley went well.

“No one’s been able to break inside of them!” said Kareem Saber, Recology’s operations supervisor for the Tenderloin.

Only one can was stolen — and it was moved a mere two blocks before the bin thief apparently gave up because it was so heavy. The company put 100 of these new cans in the Tenderloin in September and has ordered another 1,000 for the neighborhood, which should be in the field by the end of this month.

Recology's Ron Reali collects garbage on Jones Street in Tenderloin District in San Francisco, Calif., on Tuesday, December 3, 2019.

Photo: Scott Strazzante / The Chronicle

“We’ve gotten a lot of positive feedback. ... So far, so good,” said John Porter, vice president of Recology, who noted that workers have found far less litter spread around the new cans.

Porter said the locked bins will be free for customers since it eases the collection process — Recology employees don’t have to carry keys and unlock each one individually. The waste company is also changing its collection hours in the Tenderloin from late at night to early in the morning to enable businesses to open with clean sidewalks. And customers will be given a two-hour collection window so they don’t have to leave their bins outside as long.

More by Heather Knight

These are all moves in the right direction — but they need to happen more quickly and on a far bigger scale. Recology’s new cans would make sense all over the city and for black bins for trash as well as blue bins for recyclables. Incredibly, the city never regularly pressure-washes any sidewalks — and that should change. Public Works is still considering what the city’s new street trash can should look like, something it’s been considering for a long time already.

And why there needs to be more study of whether people need to use the bathroom at night is beyond me. Guess what? They do.

“People poop,” Haney said. “At night too.”

The fact that an elected official needs to state what 3-year-olds already know demonstrates how City Hall can overthink pretty much everything.

“I’m jumping up and down saying, ‘Move faster!’” Haney said. “Do the obvious, common-sense things. Be proactive and take responsibility. The people who live in these neighborhoods can’t live like this. It can’t be the norm.”

While those in charge craft pilot programs and extensions of pilot programs, regular workers like Reali and Carini are getting the job done.

Recology Operations Supervisor Kareem Saber looks for displaced garbage containers in the Tenderloin District in San Francisco, Calif., on Tuesday, December 3, 2019.

Photo: Scott Strazzante / The Chronicle

As we entered an apartment building that pays extra for indoor service rather than leaving the bins outside, Reali explained that the landlord had installed a sprinkler above the doorway because people kept using the spot to deal drugs and have sex. But now a motion sensor means people will get wet if they’re under there too long.

More Information

Listen to Recology Vice President John Porter discuss the company’s new trash cans and why nearly half of the city’s waste still winds up in landfills on the latest episode of the San Francisco City Insider podcast at sfchronicle.com/insider.

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“There it goes! The sprinkler is coming on!” Reali warned me as I scribbled in my notebook. Even though we were just standing there talking. Really.

Reali and Carini were the only people working the streets that night that I saw. Plenty of people on the sidewalks swigged alcohol, smoked drugs and huddled under ratty blankets and sleeping bags. A woman walked up the center of Eddy Street between lanes of whizzing traffic. But I didn’t see any police officers walking the streets or any outreach workers offering treatment or shelter beds.

It would seem that addressing these issues would help with the trash problem. But in the meantime, thank goodness for Reali and Carini.

“I love it. It’s exercise, and it’s not sitting in one spot,” Reali said about his job. “Even though we’re in the same neighborhood, it changes nightly and it’s fun. You might as well be happy when you’re doing it.”

Heather Knight is a columnist working out of City Hall and covering everything from politics to homelessness to family flight and the quirks of living in one of the most fascinating cities in the world. She believes in holding politicians accountable for their decisions or, often, lack thereof – and telling the stories of real people and their struggles.